by Norman Ohler
Staying awake for two days and two nights in a row became the norm for the defense physiologist. He constantly worked at high speed during the first few months of the war. Between the front, where he delivered lectures on Pervitin, and the capital, where he was enlarging his institute, he found no time to rest. His workload was getting too much for him, and he took the drug more and more regularly so as not to fall behind in his performance. It wasn’t long before Ranke was on the brink of a classic case of burnout—though the term didn’t yet exist. In his diary he reported bravely: “Personal matter: my depression has been overcome. I’ve been ready for work again since midday on 8.11.”38 But often he only went to bed very late at night, where he spent an “abundantly sleepless night,” and complained the following day: “Nearly collapsed.” His slow descent into dependency is exemplary. He tried to use chemicals to keep pushing against his own limits, even when he was completely exhausted. It didn’t always work: “19.11.39. General inability to work under the pressure of imminent discussion and inspection.”39 Ranke wasn’t the only one squashed between the stress of war and Pervitin consumption. His correspondence from those days shows that more and more officers were using the drug to keep up with their duties.
Outside of the military the addiction was also growing. In 1939 Pervitin fever was rife in the Third Reich, whether it was housewives going through menopause who “wolfed down the stuff like sweets,”40 young mothers who took methamphetamine to ward off the baby blues, or widows who were looking for “elite partners” through the marriage bureau and who took high doses to combat inhibitions during their first meeting. To help with childbirth, to fight seasickness, vertigo, hay fever, schizophrenia, anxiety neuroses, depressions, low drive, disturbances of the brain—wherever the Germans hurt, the blue, white, and red tube was at the ready.41
As coffee had hardly been available since the start of the war, methamphetamine was often added as a substitute to pep up ersatz versions of the drink. “Pervitin could, rather than being pumped into bomber pilots and bunker pioneers, be used deliberately for cerebral machinations in higher-education colleges,” Gottfried Benn wrote of these times. “It may sound deviant to some people, but it is only the natural continuation of an idea of humanity’s progress. Whether it is rhythm, drugs or modern autogenic training—it is the ancient human desire to overcome tensions that have become unbearable.”42
In late autumn 1939 the Reich Health Office reacted to this trend, which could be overlooked no longer. Leo Conti, the “Reich Health Führer,” tried to prevent, however belatedly, “an entire nation becoming addicted to drugs.” He pointed out that “the disturbing after-effects fully obliterate the entirely favorable success achieved after use.” To toughen the legal situation, he approached the justice ministry and expressed his “concern that the emergence of a tolerance to Pervitin could paralyze whole sections of the population. . . . Anyone who seeks to eliminate fatigue with Pervitin can be quite sure that it will lead to a creeping depletion of physical and psychological performance reserves, and finally to a complete breakdown.”43
In a personal proclamation he appealed in a typical Nazi manner to all honorary affiliates in the battle against drugs: “The serious nature of the times should forbid all German men and women from devoting themselves to questionable pleasures. The personal example of the rejection of drugs is more necessary and appropriate today than it has been in the past. . . . I ask you to help, through your work, to protect and strengthen German family life where it is threatened by the use of drugs. By doing so you will increase the inner resilience of our people.”44
In November 1939 Conti made Pervitin available “on prescription only, in every case,”45 and a few weeks later delivered a speech in the Rathaus in Berlin to members of the National Socialist German Association of Doctors, warning against the “big, new threat of addiction, with all its side-effects, which faces us all.”46 But his words were not taken seriously and consumption continued to rise. Many pharmacists stuck only loosely to the new prescription regulation and even gave their customers hospital packs of the drug without prescription. It was still easy for a citizen to get hold of several Pervitin ampoules or hundreds of pills from pharmacies every day.47
This was also true of soldiers. The regulation concerning prescriptions applied only to civilian society and not to the military. But Conti also had the military in his sights. A war on drugs was waged against the background of the real war when the Reich Health Führer challenged the Wehrmacht to take a position on the “use and abuse of drugs and its possible damage,” as he had observed “that our young soldiers look extraordinarily ill, often grey and sunken-cheeked.” But Conti’s Reich Health Office was a civilian authority, and the military promptly resisted his interference: “The Wehrmacht cannot renounce a temporary increase in performance or a defeat of fatigue, even through the use of medication,” Army Medical Inspector Anton Waldmann wrote back, coolly and clearly.48
“Stimulant decree” of April 17, 1940: the instruction pamphlet for Wehrmacht drug use. “Pervitin is a medication that removes the need to sleep by stimulating the central nervous system. Performance enhancement beyond waking performance cannot be attained. . . . In overdoses, there is also a feeling of vertigo and headache, as well as increased blood pressure. In about 1/10 of cases the stimulants fail even at the correct dose.”
On February 17, 1940—the same day as Conti wrote his letter of protest to the army medical authority—there was a fateful meeting between Hitler and the generals Erich von Manstein and Erwin Rommel, who had recently been appointed commander of a Panzer Division. Manstein, hands plunged deep in his pockets as always, was able to set out in great detail his risky plan of attack, which no one at senior command was willing to hear. But Hitler, who was known for constantly interrupting his generals, listened spellbound as Manstein delivered his lecture about how he wanted to push through an impossible region of forested crags to wrong-foot the French and the British.49 Although Hitler couldn’t stand the general, with his brazenly arrogant way of displaying his military expertise—“Certainly a very clever mind with operational gifts, but I don’t trust him”50—he was immediately convinced by his surprise-based strategy. The success of the operation would depend on time, speed, and a daring idea, not just equipment. The material inferiority of the Germans suddenly didn’t need to hinder an attack. Hitler didn’t hesitate, clutching at this last straw: “The Führer gave his agreement to these propositions. A short time later the new and definitive deployment instruction was issued,” Manstein’s note on the discussion concludes proudly.51
The question remained as to whether a quick push through the Ardennes could be achieved at all. There was a strong possibility of getting stuck in the rough terrain and being halted by enemy forces, however weakly positioned they were. The Allies should have had enough time to rush in with reinforcements from both north and south and catch the Germans in a pincer action. The “sickle cut” only had a chance if the Germans could drive day and night. No stopping, and, above all, no sleeping. Hitler swept all doubts aside. Of course a German soldier could be constantly ready by force of will if the situation called for it. Hadn’t it been true for him in the Flanders trenches, as a dispatch runner in the First World War?
In fact it wasn’t the superhuman will that counted. This is what Pervitin was for, after all. In Army High Command they were working feverishly on the new deployment instruction. This also included planning for medical support, and Ranke’s tests at the MA were remembered. On April 13, 1940, three weeks before the attack in the West, Army Medical Inspector Waldmann submitted a document to Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the army’s commander in chief: “The Pervitin question. Decree concerning careful, but necessary use in a special situation.”52 Ranke was summoned for discussions and drove several times from the MA on Invalidenstrasse to the Bendlerblock on the Landwehrkanal. He had to quickly write a lecture for the General Staff, and also a tailor-made Wehrmacht instruction leaflet for Pervitin.53<
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On April 15, Ranke received a letter from the corps medic of the Panzer Group von Kleist, which was to lead the thrust through the Ardennes. The group was already engaged in heavy consumption: “Pervitin seems ideally suited as a stimulant for counteracting signs of fatigue after great physical and mental efforts, particularly among brain-workers and soldiers . . . who have special demands made on their mental freshness and their capacity for absorption and concentration as well as their judgment, and who must reduce their need for sleep. Some of the observations . . . were carried out during the Polish campaign, some on drill marches and training trips, on crews and also in self-examination tests carried out by many medical officers and company-grade officers.”54 The countdown was running, and Ranke demanded Temmler increase production. Two days later, on April 17, 1940, a document was making the rounds of the Wehrmacht, one with no parallel in military history.
The so-called stimulant decree was sent out to a thousand troop doctors, several hundred corps doctors, leading medical officers, and equivalent positions in the SS. The first paragraph was as dry as it was controversial: “The experience of the Polish campaign has shown that in certain situations military success was crucially influenced by overcoming fatigue in a troop on which strong demands had been made. The overcoming of sleep can in certain situations be more important than concern for any related harm, if military success is endangered by sleep. The stimulants are available for the interruption of sleep. Pervitin has been methodically included in medical equipment.”55
The text was by Ranke, and signed by the army’s commander in chief, Walther von Brauchitsch. The recommended dosage was one tablet per day, at night two tablets taken in short sequence, and if necessary another one or two tablets after three to four hours. In exceptional cases sleep could be “prevented for more than twenty-four hours”—and was an invasion not an exceptional case? One possible negative side-effect according to the decree was “a belligerent mood.” Should that be seen as a warning or an inducement? “With correct dosage the feeling of self-confidence is clearly heightened, the fear of taking on even difficult work is reduced; as a result inhibitions are removed, without the decrease in the sensory function associated with alcohol.”56
The Wehrmacht was thus the first army in the world to rely on a chemical drug. And Ranke, the Pervitin-addicted army physiologist, was responsible for its regulated use. A new kind of war was on the way.
Modern Times
At the Temmler factory dozens of women workers sat at circular machines that looked like mechanical cakes. Steel slides pressed finished tablets onto running belts, tirelessly, thousands of them, where they suddenly began to dance, shaken up, ready for manual inspection—women’s fingers in pale gloves moved like bees’ feelers, slipping through the snow-white splendor of the skipping pills, sorting them out: bad ones cast aside, good ones straight into the special packages for the medical supply bags, into the army’s collapsible boxes, the boxes in cases with the Reich eagle on them. Everyone worked overtime, because of Ranke’s demands.
A large order at Temmler . . . 35 million methamphetamine doses for the army and Luftwaffe (above and below).
Eight hundred thirty-three thousand tablets could be pressed in a single day. An adequate amount; the Wehrmacht had ordered an enormous quantity for the army and the Luftwaffe: 35 million in all.57 Heinrich Böll would never again have to ask his parents for extra supplies.
Time Is War
Success lies in speed. The important thing is to keep surprising the defender.
—From Panzer Group von Kleist’s order to attack58
Phosphorus strips hanging on oak trees illuminated the path, which was freshly beaten through the undergrowth. In the middle of the forest stood the map house, a wooden shed hardly wider than an arm’s span furnished with a plain table and a single wicker chair. A relief map of Flanders hung on the wall, all the more vivid when you looked out of the window to the hilly landscape of the Eifel and the Ardennes beyond. Reich photographer Hoffmann, Morell’s old buddy, had positioned himself outside, frantically snapping Patient A within.
Hitler’s headquarters at Felsennest (“cliff nest”), near the old sand-track-and-half-timbered village of Rodert, May 10, 1940, seven o’clock in the morning: Major General Alfred Jodl was setting out the military situation. During the night German paratroopers, launched from Cologne, had taken the strategically important Belgian fort of Eben-Emael. But this was just a decoy attack to reinforce the Allies’ conviction that the assault was going to happen in the north of Belgium. In fact most of the Wehrmacht were massing in a completely different area, near the border with Luxembourg, much farther south. There the tanks were rattling into position in uninterrupted succession. Slightly ahead of these stood General Guderian’s medium-sized armored radio car, with its striking circular system of aerials. The mood among the troops was still anything but belligerent. “Wherever you went there was an oppressive feeling of calm, and a deep sense of dejection,” one officer reported.59
The uncertainty and confusion that prevailed among the aggressors is revealed in the fact that the German deployment, which had been in preparation for such a long time, seemed at points to be permanently stuck. Rather than setting off in good time and taking advantage of the crucial moment of surprise, there was unholy confusion and a complete collapse of traffic while still on German soil. The reason for this was that the horse-drawn vehicles of the infantry kept flowing into the broader roads that were actually needed for the tanks, and soon everything ground to a standstill. Wheel to wheel and bumper to bumper stood the vehicles of Panzer Group von Kleist, the biggest motorized unit ever assembled in military history, with a total of 41,410 vehicles, including 1,222 tanks. The avalanche of iron and steel was stuck in a 150-mile traffic jam, backed up all the way to the Rhine. It was the longest snarl-up in European history, and the Allies could easily have destroyed the whole lot with a handful of bombers, nipping the German deployment in the bud. But an attack from this bottleneck wasn’t expected, and the monstrous traffic jam went unnoticed. French enemy reconnaissance couldn’t see what was coming.
The cause of the German confusion lay in the fact that High Command still didn’t recognize tanks as being capable of leading an invasion and had assigned too few roads to them, and no zones of action of their own. No one had yet mentioned the notion of Blitzkrieg; nobody really had any idea what it was—apart from a few generals, Guderian leading the way. Over his radio, he desperately tried to persuade the infantry to free up the lanes, but the infantry saw the tanks as rivals and wanted to lead the advance themselves, as they always had done. Their flatbed trucks, horse-drawn carts, and marching soldiers, many of them carrying the same rifles as their fathers had shouldered in the First World War, continued to block the roads. But when the tanks were finally able to maneuver themselves out of the muddle and immediately rumble off through the narrow valleys and along the bending, climbing roads through the range of hills ahead of them, making up for lost time, they showed what they were capable of. Nothing would halt them, all the way to the English Channel. Well, almost nothing.
“Think Big”60
Perhaps France died in 1940: their defeat against the Germans came after only eleven days, and the country has never recovered from that humiliation.
—Frédéric Beigbeder61
“The task is a very difficult one,” General Halder, chief of the Oberkommando des Heeres General Staff, noted in his diary. “In the given terrain [Maas] and with the given strength of the forces—particularly in terms of artillery—it cannot be solved. . . . We have to resort to unusual means and bear the associated risk.”62 Methamphetamine was one such unusual means, and the men desperately needed it when General Guderian ordered: “I demand that you do not sleep for at least three days and nights, if that is required.”63 And required it was. Only if the French border city of Sedan was reached during that time and the border river Maas (or Meuse) was crossed would the Germans be in northern France sooner t
han most of the French Army itself, which was either still in northern Belgium or inside the Maginot Line farther south.
The Wehrmacht were well prepared. The quartermasters had ordered the pills in time. General Johann Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg (who became NATO commander in chief of Allied Land Forces in Central Europe in the 1960s) ordered twenty thousand for his 1st Panzer Division, and during the night between May 10 and 11, it was taken en masse.64 Thousands of soldiers took the substance out of their field caps or were given it by their medical officers.65 It was laid on their tongues and gulped down with a swig of water.
Twenty minutes later the nerve cells in their brains started releasing the neurotransmitters. All of a sudden dopamine and noradrenaline intensified perception and put the soldiers in a state of absolute alertness. The night brightened: no one would sleep, lights were turned on, and the “Lindworm” of the Wehrmacht started eating its way tirelessly toward Belgium. The listlessness and frustration of the first few hours made way for new and rather strange feelings. Something started happening, something that later no one could readily explain. An intense chill crept across scalps, a hot feeling of cold filled everyone from within. There were as yet no storms of steel, as there had been in the First World War, but instead a storm of chemicals broke out, punctuated by euphoric flashes of mental lightning, and the level of activity reached its peak. The drivers drove; the radio operators’ decoding machines, like futuristic typewriters, radioed; gunners in black combat trousers and dark grey shirts crouched behind their weapons, ready to fire. There were no more breaks—an uninterrupted chemical bombardment had broken out in the cerebrum, the body released greater quantities of nutrients, boosting its sugar production so that the machine was running at maximum output, and the pistons were going up and down exponentially. The average blood pressure increased by up to 25 percent, and hearts thundered in the cylinder chamber of the chest.
